Note: This article was first published in the United Kingdom Reading Association journal Reading and is reproduced here with the permission of the editor of that journal. We have added a glossary to explain some of the terms that may be unfamiliar to readers from outside the United Kingdom.

The piece was written five years ago. It has largely stood the test of time, but the author would like readers to take into account that thanks to developments in technology and practice, our understanding of what reading encompasses and how we can teach children most effectively has changed in recent years in two important ways:

• First, the spread of computers to primary and elementary classrooms and the proliferation of multimedia and hypertext software have led to changes in our ideas of what it is to be literate. Proficient readers should be confident and effective not only in their use of conventional book material, but also in their use of hypertext and multimedia texts. Very young children appear capable of learning important lessons in these areas.
• Second, developments in practice with group reading of shared texts and whole class reading of big books have shown us that much valuable learning can take place in these contexts, and that individual one-to-one sessions, while essential for the occasions where individual assessment is required, are not the only or the most effective context for much early learning or reading.

We all want the children we teach to be able to get the words off the page, but that is not all. We want more, not just for the brightest, nor just for those nearing the end of Key Stage One. We want all our primary children to become readers. Although fluent word recognition is, of course, essential, becoming a reader means much more than this. It is a complex matter that cannot easily be summed up in a few simple precepts, much less made to happen by following simple rules. Yet those of us involved in one capacity or another in the teaching of reading in publicly funded primary schools are castigated, almost daily, often by those with no experience of primary teaching, for failing to recognise the central simplicity of the enterprise. We are living through a public “debate” about the teaching and learning of reading in which the early stages of learning to read are presented as a straightforward collection of “skills” whose teaching and learning are quite unproblematic, requiring only a proper discipline on the part of the teacher.

We cannot afford to plan our children's learning without taking a larger and more informed view of the issues involved. Yet attempts to bring a more measured approach to the treatment of reading in the public media have been largely unsuccessful: even the education editors of “quality” newspapers see discussion informed by sound evidence and considered argument as less interesting than quack remedies. So we must do the job for ourselves in our own journals—and then go out and talk to others about it. In this article I intend to make a start by exploring what children need to learn, and the part teachers can play in the making of readers.

To do this I am going to leave aside the ten-level framework of the National Curriculum, both as we have it now on the Statute Book, and as we might have it in the future. I do so because the ten-level framework imposes an incremental view of development in reading, dealing in discrete items of observable behaviour, and so inevitably lacks depth and dynamism. The tactics and items of knowledge set out in the present attainment targets are not irrelevant to learning to read, but they are far from being a sufficient account of the process. No list of “statements of attainment” can show us a living reader, much less the process that has brought her to this state. To do this we need to enlarge our attention to include more elusive qualities such as the attitudes children have towards reading and towards the texts they read, their experiences of reading texts of various sorts, the strategies they habitually use to make sense of these texts, and what they use these texts for. Such attitudes, experiences and strategies weave together with the tactics and knowledge set out in the National Curriculum to make children readers. They are not collections of discrete behaviours learnt one at a time in a set, predetermined order, but qualities and habits of mind which develop and deepen over time.

Children possessing these qualities are set fair to become committed and capable adult readers. But skilled reading should no longer be the preserve of an élite. We need to help more of our pupils towards this goal. When they are adults, all children now in infant school will need to read texts that are more varied, more demanding, and more pervasively significant in their lives than those that make up the reading matter of most of their parents now. The less skilled and flexible their reading, the more impoverished and less autonomous their lives will be.

These qualities can be thought of as lessons—the lessons children must learn if they are to put reading to work for them and enrich their lives through it. Some of these lessons are learned relatively quickly, but others develop over a long time. Some are of central importance and others more peripheral. However, they do not fall into a neat linear pattern and cannot be set out in a neat order of importance or of teaching. I certainly do not claim that the list is definitive or exhaustive: you may well want to add other lessons. And of course many children have begun to learn many of these lessons long before they enter the reception class.

Attitudes

Children need to learn:

• pleasure and satisfaction; to see books and other texts as a powerful source of enjoyment, information, and understanding. Children who do not learn this lesson early have little reason to invest the energy and attention in learning to read that it demands. This point cannot be overstressed.
• confidence; a firm belief that they will learn to read. Children need to see learning to read as something normal and themselves as capable of achieving it. Teachers must have faith in their pupils' capacities.
• concentration and persistence. Particularly in the early stages, learning to read requires considerably more of these qualities than most other activities that young children engage in. They are, of course, closely linked with self-confidence and the experience of pleasure.
• toleration of uncertainty. Even in the early stages a reader must be prepared to put up with not knowing exactly what is going on, what a word means, or why a character is acting in a particular way, and be prepared to find the answer by reading on. Again this attitude cannot be clearly separated from others: you are more likely to tolerate uncertainty if you are confident and convinced of the ultimate reward.
• tentativeness; a readiness to correct and revise ideas about the text and its content. This is essential to the development of fluent and accurate reading for meaning, and to the construction of the complex sense demanded by stories, poems, and information texts. Expectations are crucial to reading, but so too is a willingness to admit that texts can carry surprises.

Strategies

Children need to learn:

• to make sense of a text, to focus on making it mean. Unless children learn to approach a text in the spirit of making it mean something, they cannot be said to be reading. Reading is essentially about making meaning from texts: word identification is a means to that end.
• to draw on their experience of the world and of other texts to aid them in the process of meaning-making. To understand most texts we draw on a wide range of physical and cultural knowledge. We also draw on knowledge of the patterns and structures of texts as various as fairy tales and recipes. This enables us to make sense of the particular section of text being read, to fit it into the larger whole, and to develop appropriate expectations about what is to come. Children need to learn to do this.
• to make use of the information provided by the pictures to aid them in the process of meaning-making and in word identification. Young children do, of course, find pictures easier to read than words. We should neither dismiss this meaning-making activity, nor assume that all children are highly skilled in it. They may need more help than we realise in making sense of pictures, and in following a story through a sequence of pictures.
• to make use of the information provided by the letters (and punctuation marks) on the page. If children are not doing this they are not reading. Most word identification involves attention to the marks on the page.
• to make use of their knowledge about the world in general and about the subject matter of the text being read in particular. Attention to the letters on the pages is not enough on its own for accurate word identification. Children also need to draw on appropriate semantic knowledge of what might “make sense” in terms of the developing meaning of a text.
• to make use of their knowledge of written language. If they are to identify words efficiently children also need to draw on syntactic and lexical knowledge. Through “tuning in” to the language of a text they need to make use of their knowledge of the kind of words and sentence structures to be expected.
• to orchestrate these strategies for word identification and put them to the service of meaning-making. Children need to learn to put all these strategies together in one harmonious super-strategy, thereby achieving a fluent, accurate, and thoughtful reading of text. No one source of information—phonics, spelling patterns, syntactic, semantic, or textual cues—can provide the reader with the means for fluent and accurate word identification, or with a valid conception of the meaning of the text.

Knowledge and tactics

These larger strategies imply further areas of knowledge and tactics. Children need to learn:

• the language of books. The language of written text is very different from the language of the spoken word. There is a great difference between the organized and patterned language of texts written for young children and the fluid fragmentary quality of the conversation they experience.
• the conventions of the English writing system: left to right, top to bottom, etc. Many children in our schools encounter writing systems at home that operate according to different rules. Others come to school unaware of such conventions.
• that the text is the same on each re-reading and that the marks on the page tell you what to say. Again this is not self-evident. Many children begin by thinking that it is the pictures that tell the reader what to say.
• that language is composed of separable words. Like other non-literate people, young children apprehend language as a continuous stream, not as a succession of entities called words.
• to conceive of words as sequences of separable sounds, or onsets, rimes, and individual phonemes. Many children find this lesson very hard indeed, since they are habituated to thinking of words in terms of their meaning. Thus playing “I Spy” with four- and five-year-olds can be a slow and erratic business, as they appear at first incapable of detaching the phoneme a particular word begins with. Until they can manage to do so, phonics teaching will be useless.
• to relate these phonemes or groups of phonemes to the letters or groups of letters that represent them. Unfortunately these phonic patterns are both complex and unreliable. And children vary markedly in the ease with which they learn to use this information. But learning to use these patterns is essential to fluent reading.
• to recognise irregular but common words immediately. Very many of the words most commonly used in written English do not exemplify straightforward phonic patterns. Exceptions abound, particularly in very common words such as “one” or “you,” so these must be learned as “sight words.”
• to recognise the common spelling patterns of English, together with common prefixes, suffixes, and root words. Much of our English spelling is not simply phonetic. The spelling of words such as “magician” or “heard” carries information about their meaning and grammatical status.

Experiences

Attitudes, strategies, tactics, and items of knowledge are of course gained through experiences of many sorts. Some experiences seem to be particularly powerful and to have their own intrinsic value. They are lessons in their own right, crucial to the development of children as readers.

Children need substantial experience of:

• hearing written language read aloud. Children need to be immersed in the language of the written word, thoroughly experienced in making sense of it and in savouring its cadences, through hearing stories, poems, and information that arrests, involves, and satisfies them. Extraordinarily complex learning can take place as children listen to a story that holds their attention and excites their interest in language. At one and the same time children can learn about the kinds of meanings that you can make through stories, the new words and sentence structures of which these meanings are made, the intonation patterns that give them life and make them more comprehensible, and also many of the larger strategies and even many of the tactics involved in intelligent reading.
• using many types of texts for many purposes. Children need experience of reading stories, poetry, information books, and texts on the computer screen, and of reading these in different ways for different purposes. The new forms of literacy that are developing so swiftly mean that flexibility and an awareness of difference are more important than ever.
• re-reading favourite texts and authors. If children are to become avid readers, they need early on to know certain texts very well indeed. It may be a book on African wildlife which appeals at first through the power of its pictures, and which initially the child needs help in making sense of. Or it may be a book of rhymes or a storybook, with texts that are memorable because of their patterned language as well as the meanings they convey. Knowing stretches of texts so well that they almost possess them by heart gives a feeling of mastery as well as a solid familiarity with linguistic forms and a growing understanding that texts can endure and yield more on a second or even a third reading.

If children are to learn to read well, to learn lessons of the sort itemised above and to learn many of them, we must be deliberate about how we provide for them, support them, prompt them, and teach them. We cannot let this learning be a laissez-faire enterprise, a by-product of random encounters with books and adults. Teachers have many roles to play.

Teacher as provider

From nursery on, the infant classroom needs to be rich in informative, alluring, and legible print. It is not just a matter of a lively book corner, important though that is: children need poems on the wall to reread and savour, labels on drawers to tell them what is inside, and notices that add to the displays they accompany. To help them think of words as sequences of sounds, and to learn to relate these to the letters that represent them, children also need alphabet friezes, at a height where they can see and touch them, and plastic letters to manipulate. To give the written word a sense of closeness and personal importance, they need books and other texts composed by themselves and their classmates. These materials need to be organised so that they are accessible to the children, and should be supplemented by a well stocked and well organised school library, including plenty of picture books, fiction and poetry, as well as information books.

So what about reading schemes? Surely these can give, as they claim, a clear framework for progress? Although most scheme books these days are less bland and artificial than they used to be, most still offer very limited fare. The stories lack the drive and force of “real” books. The pictures seldom add to these thin texts. The focus of teacher and learner is narrowed down to word identification, with the emphasis on the visual information provided by the letters on the page. With these thin texts the children can make only limited use of context or picture cues, and little progress in the business of learning how to make coherent and satisfying sense of the words on the page. The complex orchestration of different kinds of information, the essential skill of reading, is not fully fostered or stimulated.

If you or your school choose to use a scheme for the structure and forward impetus it seems to provide, you should be aware of its limitations and recognise the central importance of lessons that only more substantial texts can teach. No scheme book can teach a child that the words on the page can be savoured, or can yield richer meanings on a second reading. As they are marshalled through a scheme, children cannot develop their own tastes or pursue their own interests. Reading scheme books cannot teach children the purposes or pleasures of reading, and can teach only a limited version of the process. So those who are taught on a reading scheme need many additional lessons and many other texts.

And even if you provide a wealth of other texts, there is a very real danger that the reading scheme, with its structured appearance and institutional status, will come to represent “real reading” in the eyes of children, parents, and teachers, and the other books will be seen as no more than optional extras—extra-curricular entertainment.

Teacher as model

The purposes, pleasures, and processes of reading need continual demonstration. Otherwise, for many children reading can be an activity as pointless as it is bafflingly invisible. With every note they send home to parents teachers have an opportunity to show something of what reading can do for us and how we go about it. Talking one's way through the process of finding a passage that tells you how parrots make their nests demystifies the process of seeking information from large library books, and makes it that much more accessible.

Storytime, through which children can gain the familiarity with written language that is so crucial to them, gives a daily opportunity for modelling reading in action. By her excited commentary, the nursery teacher can show how turning the pages will help everyone find out whether Rosie will get safely back. With the aid of large format “big books,” the reception teacher can show something of how to identify unfamiliar words. With these and other more conventionally sized books she can help children make illuminating connections with other books and other experiences, demonstrate excited involvement and share her own tentative predictions of what might happen. By sharing her interpretation, the teacher can help children understand complex plots and hold various possibilities in their heads, and model some of the extraordinarily subtle and complex meaning-making that modern picture books permit.

Teacher as co-reader

As well as allowing the modelling of much of the reading process in ways that are visible to the watching children, big books let one invite the whole class or a smaller group into a reading partnership. In rhythmic and familiar stories and rhymes, children can “read” parts of the text long before they can read through a book unaided or recognise words out of context. But the teacher's support in this early reading is vital, if the experience is to give the children pleasure in the text and a sense of achievement. It is a matter of knowing when to read on, clearly articulating each word without losing its part in the whole pattern, and when to pause, encouraging the children to take over. With each re-reading of the text, the children should be able to take over more for themselves.

Until they have developed a degree of independence, young readers also need co-reading on a one-to-one basis, where it can be more sensitively tuned to individual children's needs, interests, and strengths. Reading and re-reading a book with tactful and stimulating support gives children a far more substantial and pleasurable introduction to the process of reading than attempting to memorise words in isolation. After they can tackle a text largely on their own, children continue to need regular sessions with their teacher where they receive this one-to-one support. This should help them use the various cueing systems more efficiently and harmoniously—to orchestrate the act of reading, and thus gain in fluency and independence.

Teacher as guide

Children need to be allowed some choice in the texts they read if they are to develop their tastes and their commitment to reading. But they cannot always know whether they will find a particular book unrewarding or pleasurable, challenging or too daunting. Some of these discoveries they have to make for themselves, and they will be the more experienced as a result of making them. But the teacher's role as guide is important too. Children left to make all their own choices may stick with a small range of familiar texts, and remain undeveloped both in terms of the range of books they read and their level of difficulty. Or they may continually choose books whose pictures hold their interest, but whose text they make no attempt to read. This does not mean that their progress should always be onward and upward: re-reading familiar texts can give children greater confidence and a deeper sense of the meanings a text can yield, as well as allowing the legitimate pleasures of revisiting old haunts and old friends. And sometimes it can be very necessary to follow the reading of a demanding text with one that is much easier. Seven-year-old Linda followed her reading of Serraillier's The Silver Sword with Holmelund Minarik's A Kiss for Little Bear. But young readers need an overall pattern of increasing challenge, in terms both of words to be recognised and worlds to be constructed. This progress needs to be discernible to parent, teacher, and child.

Teacher as reading companion

Children need to talk about the texts they read, interpreting and commenting on the events, facts, and characters, and relating them to those they know from their own first- and second-hand experience. They need to express and share their enjoyment, pleasurable fears, puzzlement, and pondering, the sources of so many of the more important meanings they will make from books. This companionship should be generous, allowing and encouraging children to make their own meanings, but extending and challenging these where they are narrow or at odds with the text.

Teacher as phonics tutor

All the roles itemised up to now imply that children can learn much implicitly—from seeing what reading can do and how people go about it, being allowed to join in with the recitation of familiar text, and moving through books of increasing challenge, whose meanings they discuss companionably. But unless they can also get a purchase on the complex system of sound-symbol relations that governs English spelling, children will not become the confident, effortless readers we wish them to be.

Through nursery rhymes, nursery and reception teachers can help their children savour the sounds of words and begin to mentally detach these from each other. Tongue twisters can refine this process. Alphabet friezes are invaluable, especially where the children are invited to make their own additions. So are those old favourites “I Spy” and “The Caretaker's Cat. ” Magnetic letters and ongoing lists of rhyming words also have a place in helping children to perceive the sounds in words and relate these to letters. Of course the emphasis in the early stages is on the simplest and most straightforward sound-symbol relationships, such as the initial sounds of “car,” “cat,” and “caretaker,” and what Goswami and Bryant (1990) call the “rimes” of “hat,” “cat,” and “sat.” Much of this early activity will take place outside the reading of meaningful text, but connections should be made, particularly in the reading of familiar rhymes. All children should be given clear opportunities to infer regularities from seeing words grouped by the similarity of their spelling pattern and sound.

Some children catch on to the phonic principle very readily. Others learn this crucial tool much more slowly and need careful monitoring and extensive support. But this should accompany the other reading lessons they are learning, not replace them. For phonics learning to be of value it must be orchestrated with many other lessons.

Teacher as organiser

The desultory encounter between distractible child and randomly chosen book is one of the many enemies of progress in reading. Children need a sense of pattern and purpose in their experience of reading in and out of school. They need to experience reading time as focused and productive, as time when they learn a number of different lessons that combine to help them make meaning from written texts. Organisation can make or break the teaching of reading. Sensitive, subtle interactions between a teacher, a child, and a text are of little use if the rest of the class is in disorder. As Her Majesty's Inspectorate (1991) have observed, classrooms where reading is good are orderly places, where children have appropriate tasks, often self-chosen, from which their attention is not expected to wander.

Sometimes the children work in twos or larger groups, reading the same text together and helping each other. Teachers may place more able readers with the less competent, or may group children of similar competence together. Sometimes classes are paired so that, for example, Year 4 children read with children in Year 1. Where such groupings work best, teachers have carefully chosen particular arrangements for particular reasons, kept the groups relatively stable, and provided other regular opportunities for individual and whole class reading.

Time spent with big books (commercial or home-made) is similarly focused and productive. Individual reading gives rise to conversation about books, making reading a less lonely enterprise than it is for many children, but is not extinguished by this talk. Parents and other helpers in the classroom work in close co-operation with the teacher. Home-school co-operation (of which more below) is similarly part of a large overall plan in which parents, teachers, and children work together, each with a clear idea of where they are going, how and why.

Taped stories, games involving rhyming and other word play fit into a general pattern, as do regular visits to the school library, perhaps even the public library. Reading weaves in and out of many activities, in maths, science, technology, and other curriculum areas, is supported and focused on when it is encountered, but also has its own daily protected space. This should be a time when other concerns, such as the exchange of early morning news, do not compete, and when the children are fresh for the imaginative and intellectual effort reading requires of them. Many teachers find that the first half hour of the afternoon is best for this quiet reading, ERIC as it is sometimes called—Everyone Reading in Class.

Organisation should not just be an individual classroom matter. As well as an agreed policy on the teaching of reading, infant teachers need to share ideas on practical matters, and plan these harmoniously. Expectations set up in children and parents in the reception class need to be met and extended throughout the infant years. Daily story and daily quiet reading, regular continuing work on developing phonemic awareness and the orchestration of the phonic, syntactic, semantic, and pictorial cueing systems need to thread right through this vital time in children's development as readers.

Teacher as partner with parents

Parents need the school's policy, expectations, and ways of teaching explained to them. Their part needs to be made clear and attractive. Book bags and home-school reading diaries with daily entries are vital to the well-being of home-school reading links. And all this needs to be well integrated with the reading carried on in the classroom. Home reading will not play its full part if the books that go home in the bags are chosen rapidly at the end of the day when the children's minds are elsewhere, or if the teacher's entry in the diary never engages the concerns of the parent or reveals any of the important lessons she is hoping the child might tackle and achieve.

Teacher as assessor and recorder

Record-keeping and assessment are vital if teachers are to help their children along a broad front of literacy learning. At the simplest level, teacher, parent, and child need a record of books read by the child and how well she tackled them, with perhaps a note of what she made of them. But more is needed if children's experience is to develop coherently. Since the attitudes, experience, and strategies that contribute vitally to children's growth as readers are qualities that develop slowly over time, in ways peculiar to individual children, ticking statements of attainment when children appear to have achieved them is not enough. Descriptive and interpretive records are essential to allow the teacher to reflect on where each child has got to, what has helped this learning, and where she might go next.

Parents and children have much to contribute to such assessment and should be invited to do so at least once each year. As well as providing the teacher with invaluable extra information, the act of reflection on the reading process can help both parents and children think more deliberately about what they are doing and where they are going.

To be of maximal value, teacher assessment needs to be written down in a way that gives it dignity and permanence, and puts the emphasis on future action. The Primary Language Record [PLR], produced by teachers working with the staff of the Centre for Language in Primary Education, provides the most comprehensible and manageable format for this (Barrs et al., 1988).

Where children appear not to be making satisfactory progress, more intensive assessment is needed if extra help is to be tailored to their specific needs. The PLR shows various ways of approaching this, notably through miscue analysis, the procedure devised by Ken and Yetta Goodman that reveals the tactics the reader is using to identify words (Goodman, 1987). But talking to the children about what they think about reading may be equally revealing. It should not be assumed that all readers fall behind simply because of inadequate proficiency in using phonics. Clear record-keeping and thoughtful descriptive assessment make full and purposeful collaboration between teacher, parent, and child a real possibility. Without them it is at best a hit or miss affair.

To become literate in a language with an alphabetic writing system, all children need to learn phonics—that is, they need to grasp the relation between speech sounds and letters. But if they are to recognise words efficiently they need far more than this, and to become readers they need more still. Children need the width and depth of experience that can come only from experience of reading a range of high quality texts, in which they can find satisfying stories and poems, and information that will extend their understanding of how the world works.

But books on their own teach few children to read. We need to do far more than throw our pupils into a swimming pool of lovely books in which they are invited to wallow. If children are not given human support and armbands, and taught a stroke or two, they may be submerged. Children need to make progress and to be seen by all concerned to be doing so. To achieve this, we need a clear sense of what children have to learn, what progress looks like, and what different texts and different experiences have to offer.

Despite repeated media assertions, the evidence suggests that the teaching of reading in our infant schools is not in a state of serious decline. We certainly need money for materials, time to plan and assess, and classes small enough to allow children individual attention. We probably also need a wider recognition that in the infant school reading is central, not just one of more than a dozen attainment targets. But what we do with the material, time, and children available to us can vary enormously in its scope and effectiveness. Despite all the upheavals of recent years, now seems a useful and necessary time to reassess our teaching in the light of developing knowledge and changing demands.

Henrietta Dombey is Professor of Literacy Studies at the University of Brighton. She has researched and written widely on literacy issues, and is a past chair of the (U.K.) National Association for the Teaching of English. She can be contacted at the School of Education, University of Brighton, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9PH, United Kingdom.

Barrs, M., et al. (1988). The primary language record. London: Centre for Language in Primary Education.
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Clark, M. (1976) Young fluent readers: What can they teach us? London: Heinemann.
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Goodman, Y. (1987). Reading miscue inventory: Alternative procedures. New York: Richard Owen.
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Goswami, U., & Bryant, P. (1990). Phonological skills and learning to read. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Her Majesty's Inspectorate. (1991). The teaching and learning of reading in primary schools. London: DES.
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In the British educational system the term Key Stage One refers to children aged from 5 to 7 years. This stage of schooling is still sometimes referred to as “infant school.” Children aged from 7 to 11 are at Key Stage Two, still sometimes referred to as “junior school.”
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The National Curriculum in England and Wales specifies the content in various subjects which children are expected to be taught. Each subject is divided into ten “levels” of difficulty. Children are expected to reach level 2 by the end of Key Stage 1 (i.e., at 7 years old) and level 4 at the end of Key State 2 (at 11 years old).
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The “reception class” refers to children in their first year at “infant school” (see the discussion of this term in the earlier glossary entry that describes Key Stage One). Traditionally these children were five-year-olds, although increasing numbers of four-year-olds are now being admitted to reception classes.
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“Reading scheme” is the British term for a basal reading program.
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Editors' Note: When this article was posted in Reading Online in January 1999, readers were invited to comment on it through a bulletin board feature that was discontinued when the journal was redesigned in July 2000. Following are the comments posted to that bulletin board.

Readers who would like the opportunity to comment on this or other articles in the journal are invited to contact the author directly or to post messages through ROL Communities.

Post 1

Author: Trina _Bright
Date: 04-14-2000 01:43

I agree that students need much self-confidence in order to develop as successful readers. If teachers collaborate with parents, students will learn faster.

Reply 1a

Author: susan loyd
Date: 04-17-2000 16:36

Students must be given choices in the classroom to build their confidence and they must be able to express their opinions. Teachers must collaborate with other teachers as well as parents. Everyone gains insight and better understanding of what the child needs.

Reply 1b

Author: Kimberly_Bierbaum
Date: 04-17-2000 18:40

I enjoyed this article. All children must have the right kind of attitude, or else, they are pretty much lost. Parental involvement also helps out tremendously, especially with a child who may be a behavior problem. Children mobel everything we do, so as teachers and parents, it is our job to lead them in the right path.

Reply 1c

Author: Christy_Steiner30
Date: 04-17-2000 22:02

I too enjoyed the article. It pointed out the advantages that "reading" gives to children. As teachers we should provide our students with a variety of opportunities and experiences to help the topics they read about come to life. The article spoke about the various "hats" that teachers wear. We as teachers are not just educators but models, organizers, and a friends. This part of the article allowed me to remember the wonderful task that we as educators are given. We are to help form our future and to do so we have to allow our children to experience a variety of literature.

Reply 1d

Author: Burgess,Branton,Courtway
Date: 04-18-2000 11:16

We also received a lot of valuable information on what strategies that we need to use in the classroom concerning reading and writing. We agree with the ideas that your articles presents and we plan to incorporate these ideas in our guided reading program.

Reply 1e

Author: Mary_Bowen
Date: 04-19-2000 11:40

I agree that students need to feel confident in order to become successful readers. I tutored a little girl last semester who had some difficulties with reading. She was in the 6th grade, but could only read at about the 2nd grade level. It was obvious that she was embarrassed of this fact. We got pretty close during the time that I tutored her, and one day she said to me, "Mary, I want to be able to read out loud in class one time without people laughing at me." Kids can be so cruel. Every time that this happened, she was set back in her reading. However, on the days when she and I would read together, all I needed to do was praise her and she showed improvement. She still has ways to go before she catches up to her classmates, but I think that she will be able to do it.

Reply 1f

Author: Deana _Crabtree
Date: 04-21-2000 09:08

It is so important for young readers to have confidence in their reading. Those students who do not read well in class are often made fun of and their self-confidence becomes lower. This summer I am tutoring my nephew. He will be going into kindergarten. He doesn't know any of his numbers or letters by seeing them and this worries my sister and mom. I do not want Chance to feel behind in his class and by starting him early, I hope to build his confidence in reading. I think that spending time with him, allowing him to make mistakes, and encouraging him will give the self-confidence he needs.

Post 2

Author: jennifer_snevel
Date: 04-20-2000 18:17

It seems that in this article the major points lie in what children need to learn as far as attitudes, strategies, knowledge/tactics, and experiences. The purpose of teaching is to get students to learn; in order to do this, we need to focus on the learner. Dombey introduces the teacher as a provider, model, co-reader, guide, reading companion, phonics tutor, organiser, and assessor/recorder. We cannot simply hand over our knowledge to the students, but rather provide them with a desire to create on their own. It is the teacher's responsibility to create opportunities for learning to occur and knowledge to be created.

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